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Spoofing and Secrecy

Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvellous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified.

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)

When the mother of celebrity abductee Travis Walton was informed that a UFO had zapped her son with a bolt of lightning and then carried him off into space, she replied incuriously, ‘Well, that’s the way these things happen.’ Is it?

To agree that UFOs are in our skies is not committing to very much: ‘UFO’ is an abbreviation for ‘Unidentified Flying Object’. It is a more inclusive term than ‘flying saucer’. That there are things seen which the ordinary observer, or even an occasional expert, does not understand is inevitable. But why, if we see something we don’t recognize, should we conclude it’s a ship from the stars? A wide variety of more prosaic possibilities present themselves.

After misapprehended natural events and hoaxes and psychological aberrations are removed from the data set, is there any residue of very credible but extremely bizarre cases, especially ones supported by physical evidence? Is there a ‘signal’ hiding in all that noise? In my view, no signal has been detected. There are reliably reported cases that are unexotic, and exotic cases that are unreliable. There are no cases - despite well over a million UFO reports since 1947 - in which something so strange that it could only be an extraterrestrial spacecraft is reported so reliably that misapprehension, hoax or hallucination can be reliably excluded. There’s still a part of me that says, ‘Too bad.’

We’re regularly bombarded with extravagant UFO claims vended in bite-sized packages, but only rarely do we get to hear about their comeuppance. This isn’t hard to understand: which sells more newspapers and books, which garners higher ratings, which is more fun to believe, which is more resonant with the torments of our time - real crashed alien ships, or experienced con men preying on the gullible; extraterrestrials of immense powers toying with the human species, or such claims deriving from human weakness and imperfection?

Over the years I’ve continued to spend time on the UFO problem. I receive many letters about it, frequently with detailed first-hand accounts. Sometimes momentous revelations are promised if only I will call the letter writer. After I give lectures - on almost any subject -1 often am asked, ‘Do you believe in UFOs?’ I’m always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. I’m almost never asked, ‘How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?’

I’ve found that the going-in attitude of many people is highly predetermined. Some are convinced that eyewitness testimony is reliable, that people do not make things up, that hallucinations or hoaxes on such a scale are impossible, and that there must be a long-standing, high-level government conspiracy to keep the truth from the rest of us. Gullibility about UFOs thrives on widespread mistrust of government, arising naturally enough from all those circumstances where, in the tension between public well-being and ‘national security’, the government lies. As government deceit and conspiracies of silence have been exposed on so many other matters, it’s hard to argue that a cover-up on this odd subject is impossible, that the government would never hide important information from its citizens. A common explanation on why there would be a cover-up is to prevent worldwide panic or erosion of confidence in the government.

I was a member of the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board committee that investigated the Air Force’s UFO study - called ‘Project Bluebook’, but earlier and revealingly called ‘Project Grudge’. We found the on-going effort to be lackadaisical and dismissive. In the middle 1960s, ‘Project Bluebook’ was